Posted Fri, 15 Oct 2010

Table of Contents

Another episode in the revolution against mouse-requisite interfaces. It's
one more step towards impulse-driven computing.

Enough marketing jargon. keynav is a piece of an on-going experiment to
make pointer-driven interfaces easier and faster for users to operate. It
lets you move the pointer quickly to most points on the screen with only a
few key strokes.

Note that I said pointer, not mouse. The mouse simply drives the pointer.
We can drive the pointer with other devices too. keynav turns your keyboard
into an fast pointer mover.

keynav is geared towards selecting a piece of the screen very quickly.

Recall from above that you are selecting a region by cutting the previous
region by half. This gives us logarithmic scaling. High resolution screens
incur about the same number of moves to select an area as smaller screens
do.

For example, to select any pixel on a screen with resolution
1920x1200 it would take 21 moves. 21 moves is horrible. There is a bright side!

How often do you really want to click on a single specific pixel on your screen using your mouse? Never, right? Well, maybe almost never. Most of the time you want to:

keynav is currently written in C and only works in X11 (Unix graphics
environment). I am planning on porting keynav to both Windows and OS X. If
you are interested in helping me with this, please contact me!
Known working:

FreeBSD + Xorg 6.9.0

FreeBSD + Xorg 7.2.0

Ubuntu Dapper + Xorg 7.0.0

Ubuntu Feisty + Xorg 7.2.0

Ubuntu Hardy + Xorg 7.2.0

Cygwin + Xorg 6.8.x

Fedora 9

I've seen strong interest in this software working on other platforms, so
I'm doing the best I can. Again, if you're a .NET (or just Windows) or OS X
coder, and are willing to help port this, let me know. It's only 200 lines
of C in Xlib, so it can't be more than a one-day-long project.

Your config file must live in ~/.keynavrc. Such as /home/jls/.keynavrc

The config file format consists of a keysequence followed by a
comma-separated list of commands. For example:

space warp,click 1,end

This would move the mouse, click left mouse button, and finish (close the
keynav selector) when you hit spacebar while keynav was active. A sample
config file comes with the distribution as 'keynavrc'.

The following is a list of key modifiers: shift, ctrl, alt, or any valid X
Keysym, such as Shift_L, etc.

List of commands:

start

Activate keynav

end

Deactivate keynav

cut-left, cut-right, cut-up, and cut-down

Cut half of the selection in a given direction. For example,
cut-left will select the left half of keynav selector region. If you
attempt to cut the window too small, the operation will abort. Cut can
take a percentage value to cut by. The default is ".5"

move-left, move-right, move-up, move-down

Move the selector window a given direction. The movement amount is
equal to the width or height of the selector depending on the direction.
You cannot move the window outside the bounds of the screen. Move can
take percentage value that specifies the distance relative to the size of
the window. The default is "1.0"

Click the mouse button twice, quickly. This can also be achieved by
doing "click 1,click 1" in your command sequence.

drag <button> [keyseq]

Toggle dragging mode for the given button. If keyseq
is given then that keysequence is held during the initial mouse button
down event. This is useful in invocations such as 'drag 1 alt' to do a
alt+click-drag on a window to move it.

Select a specific cell in the grid. The NxM syntax selects the
specific row and column. The single number syntax selects the cell
numbered counting from the top left to the bottom left. For example, a 3x3 grid would be numbered this way:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

grid-nav <on or off>

Activates grid navigation. This is also describable as 'battleship
navigation' if you are familiar with that classic game. This will make all cells
visibly labeled by a two letters which are used as coordinates to type.
For example, 'grid 5x5,grid-nav on' will give you a 5x5 grid with grid
nav enabled, making all cells labeled starting AA, AB, AC ... AE, BA,
BB ... EE.

sh <command>

Execute a command. This is run as /bin/sh -c <command >. For example:

run xterm,end

This will start an xterm and end keynav selection.
This allows you to use keynav as a general-purpose key-binding tool.

history-back

Go back one step in the movement history. Keynav keeps track of your
keynav activity and this command allows you to step backwards. For
example, if you cut-right, move-left, cut-up, then invoke history-back
3 times, your movements/cuts will be undone, in order.

quit

Tell keynav to exit

record [filename]

Record activities and save it to a register. This is very similar to
vim's 'q' command which lets you record things.

Optional argument is a filename to save the recordings to for
persistence across keynav runs. A single file will hold multiple recordings.

Example in keynavrc to bind 'q' to record to ~/.keynav_macros:
q record ~/.keynav_macros

Works similar to vim recording.

Hit record once

Type the key you want to record to

Do things in keynav you want recorded.

Any 'end' operation or hitting record again will terminate and save
this recording.

Recordings only persist if you specify a file to save to, otherwise they are lost
across keynav restarts.

windowzoom

Makes the keynav window the same size and position as the current active application window.